Continuance of a plural society in an independent Malaya required, after the British departure, the re-establishment of a balance between the races that was acceptable to all and on which the maintenance of any plural society depends. Achievement of that equilibrium in Malaya entailed overcoming Malay misgivings about being overwhelmed by non-Malays, largely Chinese, who were over a third of the population and, along with Europeans, dominated the economy. The ‘Bargain of 1957’, much of it formally incorporated in the Malayan constitution, accommodated—though in the event only temporarily—the peaceful continuance of a plural society by recognizing the special position of Malays as Malaya’s indigenous people—Bumiputera or ‘sons of the soil’.
The constitution specified Malay as the official language and Islam as the state religion. The institutions and symbols of the state were Malay or British. Considerable amounts of land were reserved for the exclusive use of Malays—as Britain had done since 1913 to ensure the continuance of their traditional way of life—to allow a mode of living which, still at the beginning of the 1980s, made Malaysia’s major towns ‘foreign ground to most rural Malays’ (Bailey, 1983, p. 11). In exchange, non-Malays were given automatic citizenship if born after independence day, 1957, or otherwise had accessible paths to citizenship. There was a guarantee of the private use of non-Malay languages and English as an official language for 10 years. Crucially, while the bargain agreed to the primacy of Malay political power, it tacitly recognized Chinese economic dominance as well as sizeable economic inequality along racial and regional lines.
Poverty in Malaysia had strong racial and geographical dimensions, both of which reflected Malaya’s pre–World War II history and development as a ‘dual economy’. The poor were concentrated in rural areas, lived principally outside the historical tin and rubber belt and were, by some margin, disproportionately Malays. The other group, much smaller than Malays, with egregious poverty were Chinese whom the British had forcibly moved to New Villages constructed to counter communism during the Malayan Emergency. Tables 1 and 2 divide peninsular Malaysia into the tin and rubber belt along the west coast and the traditional areas of the east coast and the extreme northwest. In 1957, traditional Malaya was overwhelmingly inhabited by Malays, who accounted for more than 90 per cent of the population in Trengganu and Kelantan. Chinese and Indians predominated in the tin and rubber areas and together outnumbered Malays.
Land development and poverty
Riots of May 1969